Ebb of Winter, SCO/Oliver Knussen, Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, review

David Kettle is struck by the muscular, hardy and ruggedly lyrical nature of
Peter Maxwell Davies's tone poem, Ebb of Winter

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Peter Maxwell Davies during masterclass at the Royal Academy of Music Photo: Lebrecht Collection

By David Kettle

4:51PM GMT 12 Nov 2013

“It should be heard through sea-spray and haar.”

That was how Peter Maxwell Davies chose to introduce his new piece Ebb of Winter, commissioned and performed by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra as part of its 40th-anniversary celebrations, at his discussion before the work’s Edinburgh outing. It’s an evocative suggestion, conjuring immediately the piece’s inspiration in the lowering clouds and surging surf of the beaches of Maxwell Davies’s Orkney home where, he explained, he hit on his musical imagery while out walking his dog.

His description was no less expressive than the 20-minute tone poem that the composer finally wrote: muscular, hardy and ruggedly lyrical, hardly the music we might have expected from a man only recently recovering from serious health problems. He received an instruction for an upbeat piece with a celebratory ending, he explained – but what he contrarily produced was a turbulent portrait of the stormy Orcadian winter as it finally cracks to show the first glimmering signs of spring. And, despite its anniversary origin, it’s by no means just an occasional work – Ebb of Winter is a significant utterance that takes the listener on an enthralling journey through unexpected colours and textures.

Maxwell Davies has had a long association with the SCO – as composer in residence in the late Eighties, he produced 10 “Strathclyde Concertos” for the orchestra’s principals. And today’s SCO players seemed entirely at one with the new work, aided hugely by Oliver Knussen’s superbly focused conducting, which matched an incisive ear for expressive detail with a sure sense of the piece’s grandly heaving structures.

There was still the uncompromising Max of old in the piece’s sometimes brutal textures, but rhythms had softened and simplified, and melodies lightened under distinctive folk influences that the SCO winds, in particular, delivered vividly. There were challenges for the brass in some relentless rising scales about half way through, but the composer rewarded them at the end with a glorious final chord that gleamed with acid brightness.

Although dubbed a mere “concert overture”, Ebb of Winter was a hard act to follow – and indeed, Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto, which followed, felt a bit of an anticlimax. Soloist Peter Serkin played with sparkle and agility, and was hugely powerful in the slow movement’s mounting anguish, but Knussen seemed more interested in cool clarity than fiery drama. Still, the conductor’s rhythmic precision and squeaky-clean textures paid off beautifully in the enthusiastic Stravinsky Symphony in C that ended the programme.